What Kind of an Allowance Is That for a 12-Year-Old?

It's funny what kids get up to in their parents' basements, especially pre-teens who can put their hands on ten large.

Consider the case of 12 year old Jackson Oswalt of Memphis, Tennessee who, with ten thousand dollars to spare, access to Ebay and a lot of creativity, became the youngest person to create a successful nuclear reaction, fusion, in his parents' basement.  What a busy little Beaver.

The Open Source Fusor Research Consortium, a hobbyist group, has recognised the achievement by Jackson Oswalt, from Memphis, Tennessee, when he was aged 12 in January 2018. 

“For those that haven’t seen my recent posts, it will come as a surprise that I would even consider believing I had achieved fusion,” Oswalt wrote on the Fusor.net forum.

The enterprising teenager said he transformed an old playroom in his parents’ house into a nuclear laboratory with $10,000 (£7,700) worth of equipment that uses 50,000 volts of electricity to heat deuterium gas and fuse the nuclei to release energy.

"I assembled a list of parts I needed. I got those parts off eBay primarily and then oftentimes the parts that I managed to scrounge off of eBay weren’t exactly what I needed. So I’d have to modify them to be able to do what I needed to do for my project.”